they accepted less and then they demanded more
Wages rose between 1945 and 1975. They rose in nominal terms and they rose in real (inflation adjusted) terms. Since about 1980 there has been very little growth, overall, in real wages. You see a lot of lamenting about this, but you rarely see an analysis of what happened.
Wage growth was allowed by the capitalists for three decades after the Great Depression. The Depression made capitalism look so bad that the power elites feared a clamor for system change (toward socialism). The allowance of wage growth was a way to placate the working class.
By the 1970s wages had gone relatively “so high” that (a) there was considerable “cost-push” inflation, and (b) profits were being squeezed. After-tax profits had been around 7% of GDP during the 1940s; they were down to around 5% of GDP during the 1980s. But by that point attempts to implement socialist transformation in a variety of countries over seven decades had been disappointing. Socialism had lost a lot of its allure — so much so that capitalists lost a lot of their fear of system change agitation. They then started to aggressively resist demands for higher wages.
After the 1980s capital brazenly took more and more of the social product. After-tax profits are now around 10% of GDP:
